bb slides olpc bangkok 7/28/08
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
Learners, Computers& the Storytelling Habit
Barbara Barry, Ph.D. OLPC Computational Story ConsultantPostdoctoral Associate, MIT Media Lab
Presentation at OLPC Asia Learning WorkshopBangkok, ThailandJuly 28, 2008
1Thursday, July 31, 2008
What is a Story: Many definitions!
Beginnings + Middles + Ends(Aristotle, ‘Poetics’)
Fabula & Sujet(Vladimir Propp, ‘Morphology of the Folktale’)
Creating a coherent life narrative(Kearney, ‘On Stories’)
Cognitive tool kits and Objects of social power(Marie Laurie Ryan, ‘On Narrative’)
Humans and computers as predictive and reflective storytellers(Story Generation in Artificial Intelligence)
2Thursday, July 31, 2008
Stories by People and Computers:Commonsense Computing
3Thursday, July 31, 2008
3 Storytelling Practices
* Documenting Life
* Documenting Learning
* Stories One Degree from Reality
4Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting LifeThe practice:
- A question you want to ask? A hypothesis?
- Models and examples to inform your plan
- The role of the documentarians
- Finding an opportunity to observe
- Having the resources to collect data
- Reflecting in the moment
- Respecting the subject
- Discovery and flexibility during making
- Finding an audience and sharing the story
5Thursday, July 31, 2008
Mindful Documentary
- Storytelling while standing on the ideas & observations of others during making.
- Practicing observation through the lens of others’ experiences
- Modeling human storytelling in machines - How are we similar or different?!
6Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Life : Why Computation Matters
7Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Life : Why Computation Matters
- People are not recording devices: people think, remember, and learn.
- If you record your whole life, you need another lifetime to look at it
- Looking at our pasts and imagining our futures in new ways
- Sharing (or not) in real-time
- Computation in the moment of capture
- When and where is a voice most effective? The placement of documentary evidence in the world at the most impacting time and in the most impacting place
8Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Learning: Challenges and Opportunities - Participatory List from Workshop Attendees!
- Documenting the External and the Internal Experience of Learners
- Videos of Children Learning (subject) -> Children Explaining Learning to Others (creators)
- Practices- Creating an ontology of learning moments- Anticipating learning moments (frameworks for expectation)- Explanation patterns for learning moments- Tagging the world with media learning moments- Accommodating different learning styles
9Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Learning
Original Reference:http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/roballet/
10Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Learning
Original Reference:http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/roballet/
10Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Learning
Original Reference:http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/roballet/
10Thursday, July 31, 2008
Documenting Learning: Why Computation Matters- Documenting the External and the Internal Experience
- Videos of Children Learning (subject) -> Children Explaining Learning to Others (creators)
- Practices- Creating an ontology of learning moments- Explanation patterns for learning moments- Tagging the world with media learning moments- Accommodating different learning styles
- Supporting learners across ages, classes, and cultures- When does age matter or not in understanding?- How do learning strategies translate? - When is it best to collaborate vs. work on one’s own
11Thursday, July 31, 2008
Stories One Degree from Reality
Circuits, Ladybirds, and around the World (2008)
Original Image Reference: www.arar93.dsl.pipex.com/.../trfradios02.html
12Thursday, July 31, 2008
One Degree from Reality: Why Computation Matters“A child is given a collection of beads of different colors, say green, red, blue, and black, and is asked to construct all the possible pairs of colors: green-blue, red-green, green-black, and then the triplets and so on. Just as children do not acquire conservation until the seventh year, children around the world are unable to carry out combinatorial tasks before their eleventh year or twelfth year. Indeed, many adults who are “intelligent’ enough to live normal lives never acquire this ability.
From a computational point of view, the most salient ingredients of the combinatorial task are related the idea of procedure - systematicity and debugging. A successful solution consists of the following some such procedure:
1. Separate the beads into colors2. Choose a color A as color 1.3. Form all the pairs that can be formed with color 1.4. Choose color 25. Form all the pairs that can be formed with color 2.6. Go back and remove the duplicates
From Mindstorms by Papert (p. 175-176).
Combinatorics and Story....from beads to phrases
13Thursday, July 31, 2008
One Degree from Reality: Tracking story patterns (in text and in life)& recombining elementsStory elements as puzzle pieces:
Event + Event + Event + EventI saw a bird + I went to school + I ate a cookie(text, audio, or video)
Event + Event + Explanation I saw a bird + I chased the bird + because I wanted to catch itI chased the bird + I saw a bird + because I wanted to catch it ORDER Dependance!
? + ? + ? + ? = storyI went for a walk - I broke my foot - My friend needed a ride - There are sharks in the ocean - We ate rice this morning - The book fell of the table - My friend was sad - His car broke down - I like rice - The car ran out of gas - The sky is blue (sometimes) - If a person rides in a car they are in a different place after the ride than before - My friend was laughing - We saw a funny looking dog - ..... 100, 000 statements.
Using human and computational commonsense to find the possible stories in the collection of puzzle pieces.
14Thursday, July 31, 2008
Finale : Benefits of Cultivating the Storytelling Habit
1. Reflecting- Individual, Neighborhood, Global Community
2. Communicating - 1:1 , 1:many
3. Learning concepts and practices by simulation in stories
4. Acknowledging and developing creativity
5. *Building a strong personal toolkit for thinking, feeling, acting in the world!*
15Thursday, July 31, 2008
3 Storytelling Exercises on the XO
* Documenting Life- Interview starting with breakfast- Keep track of your free form questions
* Documenting Learning
- Over the course of today document one learning moment (internal or external). Be sure to include the moment and the explanation!
* Stories One Degree from Reality- Creating a new story by identifying links between your interview story and a folklore or fiction story you find on the web
16Thursday, July 31, 2008
